The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

The 8 best-dressed men of the week

Bar of the week: Clean Air Bar with Ketel One vodka

Every week, we scour the city to find the best bars our capital has to offer. Whether you're a cocktail kind of guy, or a man who enjoys a decent draft beer, there's a GQ-worthy drinking spot to suit every taste.

The Alfred Dunhill Links Championship is the most entertaining event in golf. Yes, the Ryder Cup has the sporting thrill of pan-continental rivalry and the Masters has the romance of Augusta. But they don't have Jamie Dornan, Andy Garcia, Hugh Grant, Luis Figo and Ruud Gullit wandering the fairways alongside the world's finest golfers, such as Danny Willett, Martin Kaymer, Branden Grace and Padraig Harrington.

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For the uninitiated, the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship is an annual four-day golf tournament traditionally played on the first weekend of October, and competed by professionals and amateurs. It's a unique format, which allows the professionals to compete for a £4m prize pot, while a team competition, featuring both the experts and amateurs, runs concurrently. And the amateurs are always a glorious who's who of A-listers who play golf. All this makes for a surreal sporting occasion and some memorable pairings on the fairways. Imagine Paul Pogba and Wayne Rooney teaming up with Jamie Oliver and Bill Clinton for an FA Cup game, at Old Trafford, and you’re close to what this event does for golf.

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As much as the golf is often sublime – this year Swede Alex Noren shot a record-equalling 64 at the notoriously tough Carnoustie course – it's the action off the greens at the Saturday night gala dinner that provides the real magic, as GQ discovered last weekend. It's just the greatest random celebrity generator made real life. On the way to the bar at one point I walked past actor Matthew Goode, horse-racing great Sir Anthony McCoy, Irish rugby legend Brian O'Driscoll, former Chelsea and Germany midfielder Michael Ballack and George HW Bush's Veep Dan Quayle. At one point, the ad-hoc house band formed from the amateurs consisted of Huey Lewis (without the The News), Mike Rutherford, Tico Torres of Bon Jovi, Ronan Keating and Brian McFadden – insane.

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St Andrews itself plays its part by being the perfect venue. Tucked away just over the shoulder of the Firth of Forth, “the home of golf” is the site of three of the finest links (seaside, in layman’s terms) courses in the world. It’s also an ancient town, with eerie medieval ruins and cobbled, drunkard-bewildering winding streets; an ethereal place that is so far from the prying lens of the paparazzi that it cries out for mischief to be made. Falling, as the tournament does, towards the frozen-fingers and waterproofs finale of the golfing calendar, it has a liberating end-of-term feel to it.

Then there is Alfred Dunhill and its singular sponsorship of the event, which means the primeval fairways are kept largely free of advertising hoardings. For this, credit must go to Johann Rupert, the billionaire chairman of Alfred Dunhill parent company Richemont. It was his altering of the format in 2001, changing it from an international team event into 72-hole, pro-am tournament that placed greater importance on the amateur entrants.

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Then, in the middle of all this genius, Dunhill this year also launched its autumn/winter 2016 Links golfwear range, which must count as one of the most unusual ways for a luxury fashion house to reveal its latest work. But doing so turns out to be an inspired decision because its ambassadors, such as Jamie Redknapp, Jamie Dornan and Kyle MacLachlan can model the clothes as they play – the fairway as catwalk. Golfwear can get a hard time from the fashion world but Dunhill manages to buck the trend with its collections by keeping the silhouette trim, the branding minimal and the fabrics either rich or super-technical. GQ’s pick of the collection is the performance quilted jacket, which might just be the coolest thing we’ve seen on a golf course since the year we saw Bill Murray and Samuel L Jackson shooting the breeze near the 17th hole at St Andrew's.